On November 23, we had the pleasure of having dinner with one of our adopted twenty-somethings...

...and meeting the special someone he's found.

What a blessing.

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November 24:

I spent the day (as is our tradition) baking pies with Miss Helping Hands.

Chocolate cream for the Shoots, blueberry for Prince Charming, custard for Me Darlin' Mither, and Nantucket cranberry just because I was bored with the same old recipes (Auntie Gail usually brings the pecan, cherry and pumpkin).

Miss Helping Hands is a master pie-maker now and doesn't really need me in the kitchen, but I don't think either of us would trade our time together for anything (okay, she's twenty-something, so she might trade it for that special someone if he happened along...).

Of course, in spite of careful planning and shopping, I had to make a run to the grocery store for a few things.

There is a new joy to shopping now, though, since it means I can prayerfully look for the person God wishes to bless, put a gift card in their hand and (sometimes) pray with them.

...I like to make a whole bunch of one special kind of Christmas ornament or decoration so I will have something to put into the hands of those who come into my home or life during the holiday season.

Last year I was rather taken with birds, and I crafted cardinals from both paper and fabric until we were pretty well living in an aviary.

This year, I found myself beginning to fret a little as it got closer to December and I hadn't yet found inspiration for the season's 'favor'.

When I finally became conscious of my fretting (last Wednesday during my morning prayers), I thanked God for revealing it to me and I gave the whole idea of finding (and doing) something special into His hands.

Because the remainder of the day took turns I hadn't expected, I did not get home early enough to begin the painting I had planned to do, so I found myself with one whole, entire, completely, free hour on my hands.

I gave myself the pleasure of some 'idle' time on this here computer.

I did a Google search for "Christmas crafts", and within a few clicks I found myself looking at these adorable woodland elves on Martha's site.

I knew immediately that I was looking at an answer to prayer, because I had fallen in love with these little guys last year, had not had the time to make them, and had forgotten about them.

It was such a sweet thing to be directed to them again.

And it amazed me that I came upon them so quickly, considering there are "about 47,100,100 results" to a Google search for Christmas crafts!

I was excited, too, because I wanted to make something with supplies I already have in my studio.

Since I do have a nice pile of felt scraps, I got started on the little mittens, hats and shoes the very next day (just like I showed you in my last post).

Alas.

I have no pinecones.

The little pile of mittens, shoes, hats, scarves and heads and limbs lies motionless on the workdesk.

And when I do finally get some pinecones, I am going to set them next to all the other pieces of my little woodland elves and tell them...

Have you ever played The Game With No Name (and I don't mean the horror-survivor-electronic game)?

Creative Genius hosted his wife's birthday party here on Friday night and we laughed ourselves silly playing this game.

The only supplies needed to play the game are a pencil and a stack of scrap paper for each player.

Each player needs to have as many small pieces of scrap paper in his stack as there are players (12 players=12 pieces of paper for each person).

On the first round, each player chooses a word to write on the top piece of paper in his stack; any word he prefers, but usually a noun, because the player on his right is going to have to represent it with a picture.

After each player has written a word on his top sheet, he passes his entire stack to the player on his right.

Now each player reads the word written on the top sheet of the stack he's just been handed, places the top sheet at the bottom of the stack, and draws a picture to represent the word on the new top sheet.

Again, each player passes his entire stack - now with a picture on the top sheet - to the player on his right.

Each player then looks at the picture on the top sheet of the stack he's just been handed, places it at the bottom of the stack, and writes (on the new top sheet) the word he thinks the picture represents.

The stacks continue to be passed in this fashion - word, picture, word, picture,etc. - until each player's original stack is returned to him.

Then, one at a time, each person shows how his original word fared as it made it's way through the various interpretations.

Sometimes, if the word is fairly simple to depict with a drawing, the stack makes it back with very little, or no, change in the original word.

As was the case with "moustache" during our game on Friday night.

When this happens, it's just the variety of the drawings themselves which make us laugh.

Occasionally, a word will make it around the circle with just a small shift in meaning.

As was the case in Friday's game, when 'nerd'...

...morphed into simply "little boy".

The real fun, though, comes when something changes drastically during interpretation, and we finish with a whole stack of words and drawings which are far removed from the original.

I didn't manage to save the entire series of words and drawings which had us in stitches Friday, but one of the stacks started with the word "schnauzer".

And the first person to draw it did a fine job.

But the person who looked at the drawing thought it was a "terrier".

And the person who saw the word "terrier" isn't a dog-lover...so their drawing looked like "wolfman" (or at least that's how it was interpreted by the next player).

Things deteriorated pretty rapidly from there, and the second-to-last word on the stack was "devil".

The last artist, however, did not know quite how to go about drawing a picture of the devil.

We went shopping last Thursday for a piece of fabric to recover the seat cushion of a small (and unusual) chair which belonged to my grandmother.

Neither of us had a clear idea of what we wanted, so I suggested we just go out looking and see if anything grabbed us.

This is what grabbed her:

I couldn't seem to get a good photograph of it (probably because I didn't finish the assignments in my photography class), but it's a deep brown synthetic leather marked off in diamonds with a creamy-gold thread.

The chair, which is cream color, is part of the guest room furniture now, so I think this will suit to a tee.

I've never sewn on this type of fabric, and I'll have to put a zipper and piping on the cushion cover.

Mom wants me to wait until after the holidays to start working on this, because she fears it's going to be a real challenge.

It might.

But every time I walk by that fabric now, it seems to say "Wanna fight?"

And I don't know if I can make it through two whole months of that kind of taunting.